Original: Practices for coping with gender stigma in IT education – project group members presented the results of their research at an international conference in Kazakhstan.
Olga Savinskaya, a leading research fellow at the International Laboratory for Social Integration Research, and Tamara Mkhitaryan, a research intern, presented a paper titled "Gender Regime in Educational Organizations: Action Space and Coping Practices of Female IT Students" at the international conference "Voices at the Margins: Rethinking Gender, Labor, and Belonging" in Astana, held by the Center for Entrepreneurship Research at Nazarbayev University with the support of the Ministry of Education of Kazakhstan.
From November 15 to 17, Astana hosted an international conference on gender aspects of labor relations and entrepreneurship in the postcolonial era. Nazarbayev University President Waqar Ahmad opened the conference, emphasizing that Kazakhstan is a crossroads of histories, languages, and ways of knowing, successfully developing and discovering new sources of inspiration, innovation, and energetic development. The conference's initiator, Professor Shumaila Yousafzai, spoke about her long and exciting career and her rediscovery of her feminine potential, recognizing the various facets of her identity and experiencing changing biographical events. The conference featured the voices of academics, cultural and arts entrepreneurs, and representatives from around the world on women's strength, creativity, opportunities, and barriers.
In their report, "Gender Regime in Educational Organizations: Action Space and Coping Practices of Female IT Students," Olga Savinskaya and Tamara Mkhitaryan discussed the coping practices of female students in higher IT education. The researchers implemented a consistent strategy of combining methods and presented the results of the quantitative phase of their research—an algorithm for developing a scale for measuring female students' coping practices. Raising the issue of the patriarchal gender regime in technical educational programs, the authors concluded that female students employ multiple forms of coping practices to address gender stigma. Along with rationalizing practices, female students actively engage in collective and individual action, resisting patriarchal attitudes. This suggests that female students are willing to make efforts and create normative justifications to advance gender equality. The report was awarded the Best Paper Award. The conference generated numerous ideas for further collaboration and joint projects.
Leading Research Fellow
Мхитарян Тамара Арменовна
Research Assistant